Thursday, December 11, 2014

As
pressure on the CIA mounts in the wake of a Senate report documenting its
extensive, unchecked, and unsupervised use of torture during the Bush
administration, current and former intelligence officials are emerging from the
sidelines along with Bush administration officials to protest the report’s
accusations.

Like
the generals from South American juntas,
these individuals—who either committed or supported atrocities and
terrorism—are trying to change the record or the parameters of the debate to
secure their reputations, jobs, and possibly their futures, given calls from
politicians and human rights organizations on the Obama administration to
prosecute those guilty of state crimes and terrorism.

Both
Dick Cheney (who told flagrant lies to engineer an illegal and immoral war in
Iraq, and has always glorified state terrorism) and John Brennan (current CIA
Director and overseer of Obama’s program of drone murders) have argued that the
use of torture was necessary to protect the U.S. in a time of war.

But
it was telling that even in his defense of the agency under his charge, John
Brennan carefully said that “There was very valuable intelligence obtained
from individuals who had been, at some point, subjected to EIT’s
[torture]”.He clearly didn’t feel
comfortable saying on the record that the intelligence was obtained because of that torture.

There
are two responses that debunk this line of ‘logic’ about the necessity of
torture.

The
first is that outlined by UC Irvine law school dean earlier in the week when he
reminded us that “the debate should not be about whether the torture
worked.The federal criminal law and the
[international] treaty [to which the U.S. is a signatory] have no exception for
effective torture”.In other words,
sociopaths like Dick Cheney and lifetime members of the rogue intelligence establishment
like John Brennan do not get to decide when we trash our laws and throw out our
legal obligations by turning to methods of barbarism.

The
second argument of course, is that torture, and the array of terrorist methods
deployed by the United States in the 13 years since 9/11 have caused far more
violence and destruction than during 9/11 and subsequent attacks.There is little to no evidence that our state
terrorism prevented further attacks, and much to suggest that it and our wars
have generated new ones.

Far
more U.S. citizens—most of them military personnel—have died since 9/11 than on
that day.Hundreds of thousands of
citizens from Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan have been killed
by our terroristic wars.

Those
ill-judged wars scattered Al Qaeda from its hide-out in Afghanistan across
South Asia, the Middle East, the Horn, and North Africa.Our terrorism proved a boon to Al Qaeda and
its ilk, losing us sympathy and initiating a recruiting bonanza for the
terrorist organizations we were trying to combat.

George
Tenent, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden, all practitioners or supporters of
state terrorism from their former positions in the CIA, are crawling out of
the woodwork to defend the savagery their organization unleashed on people
outside the remit of law, oversight, or the conventional bounds of morality.These men should be speaking in public, but
not bleating from the safety of talk-shows.Rather, they should be in court, on trial for war crimes, crimes against
peace, and crimes against humanity.

Trying
to shift the terms of the debate, the Republican Party—the party of umpteen
Benghazi investigations into the non-scandal that was Benghazi—cited the cost
of investigating the terrorism of our intelligence agencies as a reason for
letting their criminal behavior go unpunished.Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein then pointed out
that “most of the cost [of the investigation] was incurred by the CIA trying to
hide its record”.The CIA is not simply
a terrorist organization in the sense that it tortures and murders.It also subverts democratic government by
destroying and withholding records about its terrorist activities.In the long run, the CIA and its pathology is
a far greater threat to our nation than Al Qaeda ever was or will be.

John
Brennan, whining at a news conference after the report was released said, “My
fervent hope is that we can put aside this debate and move forward”.

Well,
Mr Brennan, maybe we can move forward if those of you who committed torture and
other acts of terror, and those of you who ordered such actions and shielded
those who committed them are brought to justice.“Moving on” is code for impunity, and if we
are a nation of laws, as so many like to claim, those laws must be brought to
bear on those who break them.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

In the aftermath of the
attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, President
George W. Bush declared that the U.S. could not tolerate the violence of
international terrorism, and that the country would pursue terrorists wherever
they could be found, dismantling, if necessary, those regimes which harbored
them.

This promise provided
the casus belli for the
administration’s war on Iraq—not only illegal, but based on lies constructed by
the Vice President and others in the administration. But it was also what opened up the
possibility for the ill-judged U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, the United
States and other countries are threatened or destabilized not only by the
existence of international, non-state terrorism—much of it disseminated or
catalyzed by our imperial foreign policy which yields little in the way of
public benefits and much in the way of U.S. and global insecurity.

We also face a
pernicious internal threat from the military and security apparatus that grew
alongside our government’s prosecution of the War of Terror, now fought across
multiple continents on many fronts.

Dictionary.com defines “terrorism”
as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for
political purposes”. The entire premise
of the War on Terror—with its embrace of methods of barbarism—is about using
violence to create political change.

An entire industry of
state terror now exists in the United States.
Our government developed torture programs that outran their remit and
evaded official scrutiny, in part because the CIA lied to Congress and the
administration about the barbarism of their program. When the Senate sought to investigate the terrorism
of the CIA, the organization, along with its supporters in the Obama
administration, sought to frustrate the investigation.

Our government
dramatically expanded domestic and international surveillance, intruding into
people’s personal communications in a way calculated to create a more servile
and fearful population, arguing that such spying (about which the NSA lied to
Congress) was necessary to protect the public, although they can’t actually
tell us what they are protecting us from.

In conjunction with the
torture program, our government deployed the methods of state terror developed
in other parts of the world by military dictatorships: disappearance,
abduction, rendition, and extrajudicial killing.

The latter method has
ballooned under President Obama, who now uses “disposition matrices” to order
the murder of people using drones. The
murder of people on two continents using this method relies on a statistical
evaluation of a person’s movements and behavior, not on any recognizable legal
process. And investigations have proven
Obama’s program of mass murder to be woefully inaccurate when it comes to
targeting only imminent threats.

The Bush administration
waged war in flagrant defiance of law, conspiring to wage aggressive war in
Iraq—the crime for which Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, one of the first
applications of laws about war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against
humanity.

But the Obama
administration has tried to put a legal gloss on its war-making powers, arguing
that no Congressional oversight is necessary for a war waged by drones because
there are no “boots on the ground” and therefore there is no war. That is a fine hair to split for the people
whose family members are killed or whose livelihoods are destroyed by Obama’s
wars.

So if part of our task
as a nation is to recognize that something has been terribly wrong with our
conduct during the past decade or more, we also need to pursue justice: to make
it clear that there is no impunity for state terrorists, and to ensure that our
institutions are cleaned up.

Senator
Mark Udall outlined part of the problem in a speech before the Senate,
arguing that “[CIA] director [John] Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to
willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of
torture. In other words, the CIA is
lying…the deeper, more endemic problem [than the original torture program] lies
in a CIA, assisted by a White House, that continues to try to cover up the
truth”.

In 2001, George W. Bush declared that the
United States would “pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to
terrorism. Every nation, in every
region, now has a decision to make. Either
you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that
continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States
as a hostile regime”.

It was a crude basis on
which to wage what is now a 13-year war, with no end in sight. But it gets at part of our current
problem. We now have, within the United
States, within the fastness of our federal government, institutions whose
membership includes practitioners, promoters, and defenders of state
terror.

John Brennan, the head
of the CIA, is harboring terrorists and shielding them, his agency, and the
institutional culture of our security and intelligence services, from
democratic scrutiny, accountability, and justice. He is working to protect terrorists and
promote terrorism by frustrating the efforts of our democratic institutions—the
Senate, for example—to investigate wrongdoing.

In this way, Brennan
and others like him in this administration and the previous one have drawn
battle lines and are going to war with our democracy, arguing that the right of
the CIA to break the law and commit acts of terrorism is more important than
our political and judicial framework.

Both of these men—and many
others like them—represent a sickness in our government and our democracy. Whether they are harboring, defending, or
enabling state terrorists and state terrorism, they pose an imminent threat to
our democracy—a threat that today seems in precious little danger of being
brought to heel without a systematic effort to hold people accountable.

“Those who authorized
and engaged in torture should not be able to escape punishment because they
thought that they were acting to protect national security”, Chemerinsky
argued, “The ends came to justify the means, and the means were inhumane and
abhorrent. The debate should not be
about whether the torture worked. The federal
criminal law and the [international] treaty [to which the U.S. is a signatory]
have no exception for effective torture”.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Today
the Senate released its report into one sphere of the criminal activities of
the Bush administration.Under the
leadership of the President, his Vice-President, Defense Secretary, and members
of the national security and intelligence community, the United States
developed and expanded a program of torture.This was a morally depraved covert program developed secretly.It compromised our values, proved useless in
prosecuting the War of Terror, and has almost certainly generated more in the
way of ill-will and security threats than it ever served the public interest.

With
its penchant for performing one public disservice after another, much of the
U.S. media has speculated about how the release of the report might upset
people around the world and perhaps escalate the danger to U.S. interests
abroad.The suggestion, according to
this narrative (egged on by paragons of virtue like Dick Cheney), is that the
public does not need to know about its government’s state terrorism and how its
representatives were lied to and misled in order to prevent future problems.

Rather,
the Senate should have engaged in a cover-up and allowed the terroristic CIA
and the war criminals in the Bush administration to fade into the
background.That is certainly what the
CIA wanted.The rogue agency spied
on and obstructed Senate access to documents related to its terrorism, and
has colluded with the Obama administration (which practices its own form of
state terror in the form of its mass murdering drone program) to suppress
around 90% of the report released today.

I
think it’s important to know how ineffective the torture program was.I think it’s important to know that the CIA
(like the NSA) lied to the people charged with overseeing its activities.I think it’s important to know that some CIA
officers objected in strenuous terms to the brutality they were asked to dish
out, only to be slapped down by figures further up the food chain.

And
I think it’s important to know that the barbarism of our government and its
agents went beyond what it had ever admitted to in the past.

The
New York Times reported that “CIA
officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information
it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it
established around the world”.In those
prisons the CIA “used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects [note that these people had not been through any legal
process].Detainees were deprived of
sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed
while in American custody.With the
approval of the CIA’s medical staff, some prisoners were subjected to medically
unnecessary ‘rectal feeding’ or ‘rectal hydration’—a technique that the CIA’s
chief of interrogations described as a way to exert ‘total control over the
detainee’”.

The
CIA lied about when, where, and to what extent waterboarding was used.And “some CIA officers were ‘to the point of
tears and choking up’” while watching the brutal activity meted out in defense
of “American values”.

The
Times reported that “of the 119
detainees, ‘at least 26 were wrongfully held…[including] an ‘intellectually
challenged’ man whose CIA detention was used solely as leverage to get a family
member to provide information”.

CIA director John Brennan, an architect
of much of the terrorism that defines our foreign policy, argued that the
report was “incomplete and selective”.He is certainly correct inasmuch as his organization—in the long run a
far greater threat to our democracy than any international terrorist
organization—was permitted to kill the release of the entire report.

Revelations
about the U.S. torture program are long overdue and represent only the tip of
the iceberg if we are interested in examining the crimes of the Bush
Administration.Top members of the
administration, particularly the Vice-President, conspired to wage aggressive
war by lying openly to the public about connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein.

That
war killed hundreds of thousands of people and saw the privatization of
sections of our national security apparatus, leading to massive war
profiteering.It not only killed huge
numbers of Iraqis, but destroyed the country’s infrastructure and
institutions.It spread international
terrorist organizations across the Middle East, generating threats to the
United States and the wider international community.

No
one has been held accountable for these war crimes and crimes against peace and
humanity.And if the CIA and the current
administration have their way, we will wring our hands for a few hours and then
forget the violence and illegality of this torture program and the larger war
of which it was a part.

According
to the New York Times President Obama
“welcomed the release of the report, but in a written statement made sure to
praise the CIA employees as ‘patriots’ to whom ‘we owe a profound debt of
gratitude’ for trying to protect the country.But in a later television interview, he reiterated that the techniques
‘constituted torture in my mind’ and were a betrayal of American values”.

I
suppose we could expect no greater clarity from so morally compromised a
President.As the public pleads with
President Obama to address the systematic violence of domestic policing, and
the pernicious role of racial profiling within that policing, the President
runs his own program of terror that relies on profiling, only with more
consistently lethal results.

Under
Obama, the CIA uses a “disposition matrix” to murder people based on the
statistical significance of their movements and appearance.We know that some 96% of the people murdered
under this program had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, and that many murder
victims had nothing to do with any militant organization.

People
who authorize, perform, and protect torture and rendition and “disappearances”
and extrajudicial killings—the features of our more than decade long War of
Terror—are not “patriots” in any positive sense of the word.They are terrorists, by even the simplest
dictionary definition.Like Al Qaeda,
they are using violence for political purposes—albeit different purposes.Unlike Al Qaeda, they are using terror as a
tool of the state that gives their activities a veneer of legality.

As
deplorable as the actions of CIA officers who tortured might be—the fact that
others objected to and rejected torture demonstrates that these officers do
have moral agency—the real culprits are the architects of the national security
apparatus which makes this kind of violent, shameful behavior imperative and
acceptable.

If
someone commits a murder in our society, or attacks other members of our
society, we demand justice.While some
might demand that justice for retributive purposes, the real reason is to remove
a threat to society and demonstrate that as citizens we will not tolerate
violent behavior.

And
yet in this case, people who torture and murder and abduct other human beings—in
violation of U.S. and international law—are permitted to walk free.Whether our current President, his
predecessor, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfeld, the fact that these criminals are
granted impunity ensures that there will be no end to this counter-productive
and immoral state violence.Future
advocates or practitioners of state terror will take comfort from our failure
to act.

We
should not embolden such behavior, but rather pursue it with the full force of
the law.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

It
should be clear, on the eve of extended tuition hikes at the University of
California that Jerry Brown has been no friend to the UC during his latest four
years as Governor.He continued and
deepened the cuts made by his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who appeared
to at least understand the importance of UC), and restored only minimal funding
in the latter years of his tenure.

While
he has hit the right notes in complaining about a bloated administration and
unseemly pay raises amongst the growing cadres of bureaucrats at UC, Brown has
also pushed the University to cheapen its mission, shoving students out the
doors as quickly as possible, substituting online courses for a serious
education, and scaling back the UC’s ambitions.He is presiding over the slow but steady privatization of the UC, as his
refusal to fund the public institution forces tuition steadily upwards given
that UC is educating more students, engaging in more research, and is ever more
connected to California’s political economy and, therein, the state’s fortunes.

But
Californians shouldn’t be surprised by Jerry Brown’s hostility to the state’s
preeminent public institution and the country’s best university system.Since the 1970s, Brown has adopted a Tea
Party-esque view of the public sphere, often providing a pseudo-intellectual
gloss for his small-minded irresponsibility, his embrace of crippling
austerity, and his obsession with “fiscal responsibility” and the social
irresponsibility that goes along with a doctrine which sees budgets as ends
rather than means.

But
Brown also has a more specific track record when it comes to UC.

David
Gardner was the University of California President from 1983 to 1991, coming in
on the heels of Brown’s first two terms as Governor.The timing of his tenure meant that Gardner
spent his early years picking up the pieces at a University suffering from
neglect.In his autobiography, he mused about
“how [he] would have managed as president in the later 1970s with Governor
Jerry Brown and what came to be his quite unfriendly views of the University of
California” (103).

Gardner
elaborated on the out-going Governor’s hostility to UC, recalling how “Brown
felt UC’s high standards for admission, excellent faculty, world-class
research, and vast intellectual, cultural, and creative resources were an
unreasonable burden on the state.If UC
wanted to seek and attain those levels of excellence, [Brown] believed, then it
could get the money from sources other than the State of California’s
taxpayers” (160).

Gardner’s
analysis suggests that Brown had little understanding of the logic of
California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, and did not appreciate that UC’s
very strength came from its location at the intersection between providing
public education and engaging in public research.And let’s not forget that today, the other
tiers of California’s higher education system—the California State University
and the California Community Colleges—have also been victims of Brown’s
attacks.

Jerry
Brown is normally seen as the antithesis of the morally-stunted,
small-government fanatics who have dominated California’s politics since the
1970s, first under Ronald Reagan and then thanks to undemocratic supermajority
requirements enshrined by Proposition 13, from their minority status in the
legislature.But Brown actually bears a
striking resemblance to those on the far right.

This
parallel was not lost on Gardner.“In
strange ways”, he wrote, “both Reagan and Brown had concluded that UC shouldn’t
be as excellent as it had become, at least not on the taxpayers dollars”
(161).This is a view that Brown
regularly propounds to voters today, usually as an excuse for not addressing
the underlying structural problems that flatline or shrink California’s revenue
at the same time that the state is growing in population and demographic
complexity.

Gardner
faced considerable challenges as an incoming President, in part because the UC
was resource-starved and “had suffered grievously under Governors Reagan and
Brown for sixteen years” (196). Both of
these governors were, in his mind, guilty of “fiscal neglect” (211), and their
neglect had created a great deal of anxiety within the UC system.

Gardner
recalled how during budget discussion at UC, “everyone seemed clearly committed
to the university’s well-being, its mission, and its importance to the state,
while expressing time and again a fear for the university’s immediate and
prospective fiscal health.The fear was
well-founded, owing to the deteriorating base of UC’s funding from both state
and federal sources, the reduced state of affairs for the university’s five
medical centers, and low moral within the university as a whole, weary from
fighting with California’s governors for sixteen years, eight with Ronald
Reagan and eight with Jerry Brown” (151).

Brown’s
attack on public higher education today is deplorable, as is his tacit support
for the privatization process that makes students pay nearly $15,000 per year
to attend the institution that did not charge tuition when he was a student.Brown might think he is calling out the UC
Regents, but his actions are only playing into their hands as they push the
privatization of the UC that their experience in the corporate world suggests
should be run like a business rather than an institution of learning.

When
confronted about the rank hypocrisy of his destructive approach toward higher
education, Brown responds with the kind of vapid homilies that have
characterized his life of public disservice, and which have the commentariat
snuffling, pathetically, at his feet.“The pressure of not having enough money can force creativity that
cannot even be considered”, Brown
proclaimed.

The
Christian Science Monitor reported on Brown’s suggested “cost-cutting
measures…upping dramatically the use of online courses, concentrating specialty
courses at specialty campuses, and giving college credit for work experience”,
all things designed to make UC less of a system and more of a work-house, deaf
to the needs of the state community it serves, and obliging the sociopathic
interests in our state which believe they have no responsibility to fund public
services.

Doing
his job and funding the state’s institutions apparently has not occurred to
Brown…that sort of creativity and public service is evidently far beyond the
realm of consideration.

Some
have sought to explain Brown’s forty-year crusade against a strong public
sphere in psychological terms, as a rebellion against the transformative legacy
of his father who, as Governor, built much of the state’s social and physical
infrastructure.

You
could arguably explain his particular hostility toward UC in a similar
light.Perhaps the man who fancies
himself an intellectual seems fearful of the institution capable of calling him
out on the shallowness of his thought, the paucity of his imagination, the
cheap phrases he constructs to mask his embrace of right-wing sociopathy and
the self-interest that have defined not only his own years in the spotlight,
but also the culture that his actions over four decades have helped to create in
California.

----- David Pierpoint Gardner, Earning My Degree: Memoirs of an American University President (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.